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Friday, 1 February 2013

Political Islam in a Pashtun Village

By H.
Amin

While leafing through Mawdudi’s Islami
Riyasat (Islamic State) in 2006, as a doctoral fellow, I remembered first
reading it in 1991, when I was a student-activist in an organization that
subscribed to Mawdudi’s ideology. This journey from reading Mawdudi’s seminal
book, as activist, to an academic understanding of it has a self-referenced
history, and the main underlying motivation for conducting this research.

Conducting research on the Islamic
movement, the Jama’at-e-Islami Pakistan, its ideology, historical trajectories
and the perpetual dissent it spawned over time, is not merely an academic
pursuit for me. The Jama’at and its deep imprints on society are personal for
me, kindled deep in my heart and conscience. This discourse is an elaborate
history of my childhood; I was brought up in an overwhelming Jama’ati
environment (a family or social condition shaped and deeply influenced by
Mawdudi’s ideas and activities of the Jama’at). Like most of his contemporary
modern educated, middle class revolutionary friends (inqilabi dost), my late
father embraced the Jama’at’s “revolutionary message” (inqelabi dawat) in the
1970s, wholeheartedly. His personal thinking, political, economic and social
life, and worldview were an embodiment of the new message. As a true believer
in the supremacy of his newfound identity, my father preferred his mission of
spreading the message to everywhere around his village, to his family and
social responsibilities.

When I was born, my surroundings and family
were dominated by the thoughts of Mawdudi, Qutb and Hasan al-Banna. Mawdudi’s
books formed the dominant academic resource that ruled and subdued all other
household articles. A number of weekly and monthly politico-religious magazines
further bolstered the intellectual dominance of the Jama’at literature and
moral-story digests in my childhood home. This rich intellectual resource
centre, as my father would repeatedly remind us, was augmented further by
frequent meetings with my father’s Islamist friends, missionary brothers – as
brothers in movement (tehreeki bhai) – at our hujra (guesthouse). We, as kids, would attend to the guests as waiters
as per the Pushtoon tradition of hospitality. My old, sane and traditional
grandfather would, time and again, resent such alien activities of my father
and exhort him to stick to the traditional Islamic school of thought prevalent
in the village—Deobandism. Grandfather did not like my father’s intellectual
subordination to Mawdudi’s teachings and the associated social and political
activities. My father’s subscription to Islamism was Mawdudiyyat—a derogatory
term for Mawdudi, which was coined and popularized by traditional ulama—for many,
including my grandfather.

Conversely, the 1980s brought about an era
of Zia’s ill-conceived Islamisation and Afghan jihad projects. More comfortable
in the company of the new dictator than representative democratic governments,
the Jama’at jumped on the Afghan jihad and Islamisation bandwagon. From my
first introduction to these new subjects, I observed intrusion of a strong
jihadi bias in the meetings of the Jama’at and its student wing, Islami
Jami’at-e-Talaba Pakistan. In these meetings, jihad assumed primacy over all
other positive/productive social, political and religious reformation as the
space where these activities were hijacked by propagandist literature. My home
library also suffered from this change. Books and pamphlets, posters and
handbills on active jihad made their way onto bookshelves, replacing mere
ideological and religious material. The shift in the balance was considerable
and was felt by everyone. The 1980s was also an important decade for the
villagers because their incomes rose remarkably due to a flourishing timber
business and remittances coming from the oil rich Arab countries. The rising
incomes had a demonstrable effect with a construction boom, improved nutrition
and modern consumption. Then the village received a telephone exchange and the
number of TV sets increased. The Jama’at activists had now more sources of
leisure, less time for friends and ideological discussions. Competition in
business, jobs and grown-up children demanded more attention, leaving less time
and resources for friends and relatives. Now, even the most urgent issues could
be discussed on the telephone.

Nevertheless, the opportunities had
different effects on income, lifestyle and consumption patterns of the Jama’at
activists. This invoked a tension within the Islamists network. In the late
1980s and early 1990s, the Jama’at central leadership changed; the USSR
withdrew from Afghanistan; in Pakistan, democracy was restored; International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) entered as more visible actors in
controlling economy and economic policy; and armed struggle in Kashmir was
launched. In addition, all of my father’s movement brothers transformed into
new individuals in terms of age, profession, life style, income, family size
and pessimism with the arrival of an Islamic revolution.

Thus, in 1989, I joined the Jama’at student
wing (Islami Jamiat Talaba Pakistan) when I was in the ninth grade. From that
point onwards, the Jama’at activism was not something that I would only observe
as an outsider but an internal experience, which I was passing through. My
father’s generation of Jama’at activists sowed the seeds of an Islamic
movement, and it left a “rich resource centre of ideological books” for us as
the most precious asset in inheritance (my father would tell us all the time)
that we, the sons, were now dealing with the fruits of the Afghan Jihad project
and were building on that.

Though, for us, it was not the USSR but the
Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and Dr Najeeb’s government in Kabul that were
the main hurdles in reaping the crops of Afghan jihad. The new goal was to liberate
Kashmir from Indian occupation. I actively participated in all electoral campaigns
which were held in the 1990s; these included fundraising schemes for Kashmir
jihad and student activism on campuses. Today, most of my father’s’ friends
have tired of this endless struggle, become grievous of the growing elitism in
the Jama’at environment, or cried over Jama’at’s current leadership, which
deviated from its original ideology and the path set by Mawdudi. Some negotiated
space between Jama’at activism –their own business and politics – and
negotiated their current positions within the Jama’at by switching from more
political activism to more dawah and social activism. Still, others left of
their own accord or were expelled over growing differences with the ideology
and strategy of the Jama’at. I am witness to the introduction of Javed Ahmad
Ghamidi and his students steadily making their way through their audio lectures
and booklets in our home library. My father and his friends would never allow
me to read Ghamidi’s books or listen to his lectures. These, he insisted, were
based on a deviation from Mawdudi’s ideology and were based on the intent to
harm the Jama’at cause.

Through this connection, in the mid-1990s,
I faced the same attitude and response from my father as he confronted his
father: to my grandfather, my father’s defiance was a serious offence because
he was deviating from the traditional Islam as was told and narrated to them by
the village imams and ulama. To my father, my defiance was substantial because
I deviated from the most modern interpretation, ideology and strategy of an
Islamist movement, which were Mawdudi and the Jama’at. My grandfather accused
my father of creating havoc in the original religion; my father accused me not
only of deviating from Islam but also from Mawdudi’s political Islam.

At the time, it was not an academic
argument (which it would later become) that enabled us to pass through
competing understandings of Islam, and its relation to state and society—my
grandfather’s insistence on traditional Islam, my father’s commitment to
Mawdudi’s Islamism, and my own introduction to Ghamidi and his ideas. These
were religious tensions within and without. We experienced these tensions but
could not describe them in academic terms. I see this incessant dissent,
rupture, discontinuity, change, transformation, mutation and deviation as a
normal pattern within my own lived Islam, and not an exception found only in
the modern Western world.